Cod Almighty | Diary

On the absence of goalposts

26 June 2015

Retro Diary writes: Is there a time of year when you should just stop thinking about football altogether? If so, then surely this, the last week of June, is it. Players are still being paid under their old contracts for the time being. Those who wanted to re-sign have done so, and those hanging on for the best offer aren’t desperate for things to be sorted out for another week or so. This time last year, Scott Nielson would be on his third out of four holidays (the last one to recover from the others). It should be all quiet at home.

But this year something has gone badly wrong, and frankly I’m slightly worried about ‘burn out’. Will I get to November, and with Town comfortably top, find I’ve overdosed and need some time off?

I chose a sunny day to renew my season ticket this year. The pitch was a fresh, vivid green, and a swallow quartered the turf with the brilliant light glinting off its back. It was hard to choose a seat in the Main Stand from which I could see the goals between a forest of poles, because the goals weren’t there – taken down for the summer. No goalposts. You see, if anything is telling you to stop thinking about football, it’s that.

I chose an aisle seat, so that next season if I want a little ‘chat’ with the ref as he approaches the tunnel I can get there quickly as soon as the final whistle goes. Last year I had to climb over a whole bunch of professional-looking older gentlemen and an elderly lady with a rug on her legs who invariably spent the whole match slagging off Lenell. By the time I got to the tunnel all ready to give Ross Joyce some friendly advice, he would be away into the bowels of the stand, half way to the shower and already looking ahead to X-Factor.

But now, in the sun, with a swallow’s ringing call echoing around an empty stand, this all seemed a long way away.

For most of my life, mobile phones and other hand-held internet devices didn’t exist. The first time my work tried to get me to take a mobile out with me was, I think, 1996. I refused because I said it was too heavy and the aerial used to stick in my gentlemen’s area when I sat down. Having no mobiles made the world a very different place. If you didn’t turn up somewhere, people were worried sick about you till you did. If you got to Asda without finding out what sort of dog food you were supposed to get, you had to guess. And if you lost someone in there, you had to walk around until you found them.

The downside, so they tell us, is that nowadays you’re never off duty. Before mobiles existed, you went home at night and your boss didn’t ring you, and if you went out, he couldn’t anyway. Nowadays, they say, there isn’t a time when you can truly be away from your responsibilities and chill out.

Actually, I think the opposite is true. Nowadays if the phone isn’t bleeping or dinging at you, you know everything’s fine. You couldn’t say that before. If you were on the first day of a two week holiday in Lanzarote you had absolutely no idea what was going on at home. Your company’s main supplier could have pulled out and someone could be letting the work placement kid do the rotas. Your guttering could be hanging down, or your car standing there with a smashed window and its alarm going off. Eventually, if you wanted to find out if Town had signed anybody (come on, first things first) you had to find a payphone and a pile of local money, and half the time when you rang, nobody knew anyway because it was Sunday and there was no Telegraph.

Now, it’s easy. All you have to do is pull out your smartphone wherever you are, look at Cod Almighty in the early afternoon every day, and let your team of dedicated diarists take the strain.

So go on, have a few days off – it might be your last chance. Go and sit under a wet hedge dripping with dog roses, take in the scent and read some Wordsworth. Or turn down the lights, turn up the Orphan Boy and zone out. Or go and sit on a hot beach and think about life. Or just nothing - that’s if they’re not the same thing.

The only news to report this week is the signing of Andy Monkhouse, who is already well-known to us. He’s a left midfielder in the mould of everything Scott Nielson isn’t. At least he’ll be a target for giant punts upfield. Joy.

He lives in Leeds – he could have given Carl Magnay a lift. I’m joking. Well half joking.

And I’m also thinking about football again. If it’s a clear night tonight I’m going to see if I can locate the Andromeda galaxy. No, I’m not talking about mobile phones again - at two-and-a-half million light years away it’s apparently the most distant thing that can be seen with the naked eye. If that doesn’t make football seem trivial, then there’s really no hope – I’m destined to obsess about the very Earth-bound matter of Grimsby Town every minute for life. It’ll be sort of like tinnitus. Inescapable, even, even, in the last week of June.